A recent Washington Post article talks about US pharmacists’ increasing tendency to refuse to provide hormonal contraception, based on (mostly spurious) ‘ethical’ grounds.

Refusing to fill certain prescriptions means that unless you work alongside a colleague whenever you’re on duty, you’re not a pharmacist. Refusing to fill *or transfer* certain prescriptions means that you’re not a pharmacist at all. And passing legislation to protect these not-pharmacists from dismissal is even more stupid than whatever the official Most Misguided Piece Of Leftwing PC Ever is.

Kevin Drum has more thoughts, including a wider point on how too many liberals have lost interest in the struggle for gender equality. Matt Yglesias also sort-of has related thoughts, but they’re mostly about Ewan McGregor and genderless wankers.

Oh, and in case anyone is reading this and thinking ‘ooh, those crazy Americans and their theocratic junta‘, it’s also happening over here.

The Yorkshir Ranter gives good rant: "By night he schemes to crash jets flaming into the silvery towers of Canary Wharf, to scatter a silent dust of anthrax spores in the corridors of Parliament itself, to riddle the glowing high-end retail spaces of Heathrow Airport with machine gun strikemarks and spilt blood, yes, even to consume all London in the momentary sun of a nuclear explosion. But by day, he is an absolute pussycat, as dangerous as a potato and as remarkable as a commuter, free and weird on the streets!".

Meanwhile, Brian Micklethwait (who I increasingly believe is far too sane to write for Samizdata) has some interesting musings on Christianity and pain. His thesis, crudely, is that Christianity is suited to societies where physical pain is prevalent and intense, and the advent of effective pain medication is a major factor in its current and future decline. The theocratic junta running the US provide supporting evidence for this theory, since it explains their willingness to lock up doctors who prescribe pain relief. Hopefully the drugs will win out in the end.

And the best bloggeekish one-liner I’ve heard recently is an aside from Tim Lambert: "(‘Fisking’ is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts)". Also through Tim, something I’ve wondered about for a while: is Wizbang a parody? Surely to God it must be…

We strongly believe in taste and decency – although as Harry says, it’s not the sick jokes that are the real sick jokes. Woah, that’s gnomic.

Meanwhile, public fatwa time: any journalist lazy enough to interview ultra-right-wing rentaquote merchant Norman Brennan should be kneecapped, and his Victims of Crime Trust should be forced either to sack him or to lose its charitable status.

Mr Brennan is clearly using the charity’s position to promote his own dribblingfascistloon political views, which is allowed only if the political activities "enable the charity to fulfil its purpose, [and] are based on reasoned argument". They don’t, and they aren’t.

The world is hectic at the moment. In the meantime, go and read this excellent piece on IP battles from The Register – a site that features some of the most interesting writing of the moment, online or offline (it also features articles by Andrew Orlowski, but these should be reasonably easy to spot and skip).

You may not be surprised to learn that Tom DeLay is an appalling hypocrite, both for his attitudes on right-to-die and on his attitudes towards frivellous lawsuits (via Crooked Timber). And I’m certainly not surprised (but still pleased) to see the Conservative party tearing itself apart in comedy fashion just after starting to make some electoral headway.

Jonathan King is free, is a patently ridiculous person, but has a reasonable point to make: while pulling 15-year-olds isn’t a classy thing for a middle-aged man to be doing, it’s somewhat insane to treat it as a serious crime worthy of a seven-year jail sentence. Not quite as insane, however, as criminalising possessing the name and address of a soldier. Spyblog has more on the latter.

Finally, is it libellous to call someone who keeps sueing his critics for libel a nasty, litigious piece of work?

…he wasn’t Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. Rest in peace.

The forces of good need your vote in their battle against the forces of evil.

Go here, and vote for anyone but the sub-sixth-form-economics Adam Smith Institute. I went for right-wing lunatic Guido Fawkes, but Political Betting, Recess Monkey and Harry’s Place are all preferable to the Mises-ians.

Then go here and vote for Europhobia. Or failing that, anyone who isn’t Lib Dem Watch. There’s also a ‘best blogging politician’ section, but since Boris and Tom Watson aren’t there, you might as well skip it.

Finally, click here and send an angry email asking why the best blog in the whole wide world ever, Shot by both sides, wasn’t nominated.

The Telegraph reports on a paper presented to the Royal Economic Society, which shows that the minimum wage has massively enriched Britain’s poorest employees.

Oddly enough, that isn’t quite the view you’d get from casually reading the Telegraph article. It’s certainly not the view that Tim Worstall got. Nor, it would seem, is it the view that the authors intended to convey.

The study finds that the time worked by minimum wage employees has fallen by 1-2 hours per week since the minimum wage rose from £3.60ph to £4.85ph. Tim says "Raising the incomes of the working poor with no ill effects eh?… This is not quite true.". However, he’s wrong.

Taking the two-hour figure and assuming that it’s pro rata (time worked by 40-hour employees has fallen by two hours; time worked by 20-hour employees has fallen by one hour), hours have fallen by 5%, while hourly wages have risen by 35%. The implication is that the minimum wage, with no adverse effects on employment, has made Britain’s poorest workers at least 30% better off. Or more, if you assume they dislike their jobs and enjoy the extra two hours’ free time.

The authors actually do the same calculation, with a similar result (the difference reflects the fact that they’re not doing their sums based exclusively on two figures from a news report. At least, I hope they’re not). However, they phrase it in rather weaselly terms: "about one quarter of the increase in basic weekly earnings of minimum wage workers was clawed back by the estimated reduction in basic hours."

Christing hell. If someone gave me a 25-30% pay rise and cut my weekly hours by two a week (that’s equivalent to an extra 2.5 weeks’ annual holiday), I’d throw a party. What’s with these weirdos who assume a reduction in hours is a *bad* thing?

The main lesson to draw from the BBC Director General’s amusing biting habit appears to be that his bitten colleague, Anthony Massey, is a bit of a cock: trying to enforce "the whole [employer’s] disciplinary process" is reasonable if you’re discriminated against or persistently bullied, but is an lame thing to do to someone over a single mostly-harmless incident.

Still, it pales into insignificance compared with the Republicans’ wonderful attempts to force academics to respect the stupid beliefs of the fundie, Fox-watching community. "The law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities" – did someone say frivolous lawsuits…?

(left-wing PC often pisses me off as well. But at least it’s founded on obviously-true principles such as ‘discriminating against people on the grounds of race and gender is not only bad, but also easy to do accidentally through modes of speech and jumping to conclusions about people’s character, so we should try and stop it’. Right-wing PC is broadly founded on principles such as ‘it hurts my feelings when you point out how stupid my views are, so we should try and stop it’.)

Discuss, with reference to this appalling bunch of cunts.

Seriously, why the fuck has society developed the view that abusing children is worse than murder, when it’s patently obvious to anyone who isn’t insane that murder is worse than abusing children? (should you be sceptical of this, I recommend you speak to someone who was abused as a child and suggest that they would be better off if they were dead).

(via Laban)

Which is the better door?

vs

(both from the rather excellent funkypancake, which has many Londonular pictures).